Sacha Vaughan, chief supply chain officer at houseware manufacturer Joseph Joseph, is in a fortunate position – her board recognises the critical role of the supply chain in a digital age, which she suggests isn’t always the case.
“Many brands see the supply chain as simply moving boxes from one place to another,” she says. “The consensus is often that, ‘It’s not that difficult.’ However, we’ve had some pain in the past. The board realises that the supply chain is more than just moving boxes from A to B, and it’s a huge lever for cost control. Therefore, they treat the supply chain strategically.”
Vaughan says this recognition of the importance of product fulfilment isn’t just a result of internal cost pressures. She suggests supply chain chiefs have had an interesting decade, characterised by a series of disruptions, including the coronavirus pandemic, Brexit and the implementation of new tariffs following the change in US administration.
“We’ve been fortunate and unfortunate at the same time,” she says. “The world has been particularly volatile from a supply chain perspective. However, the impact of these disruptions has helped to elevate the supply chain from the basement into the boardroom.”
Embracing supply chain transformation
Vaughan joined Joseph Joseph in February 2025. Having fulfilled senior operations roles with Forma, Charlotte Tilbury and Shiseido, her previous position was as global operations and manufacturing director at Dyson. She was approached about the opportunity to become chief supply chain officer at Joseph Joseph and was impressed after a discussion with the firm’s co-founder, co-owner and CEO, Richard Joseph.
“I was sold the moment I met him,” she says. “He’s super smart and a great businessman who’s really clear on what he wants. He was someone I knew I could work for, and I bought into his vision. I absolutely love the product, and the founders – both Richard and Anthony – are delightful to work with.”
Vaughan recognises there are similarities between her current and former employers, as both are design-led businesses where the founders remain heavily involved. However, climbing higher up the career ladder at Dyson required a move to Singapore. She says joining Joseph Joseph allowed her to achieve her career aspirations in the UK at an organisation she admired.
“Chief supply chain officer was definitely my trajectory – it was the role I wanted,” she says. “And they were offering that opportunity at an exciting time. They were looking for someone to completely transform their supply chain, not do more of the same. I really believed in that vision. And seven months later, that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
Vaughan says the supply chain she inherited was a bit underdeveloped. She describes the existing supply chain as sedentary and traditional – she was given the remit to drive changes and create a modern, technology-enabled approach. Vaughan is focusing on transformation with the aim of developing an award-winning supply chain.
“That’s the motivation,” she says. “We’re not there now, but we will be. The talent within Joseph Joseph is quite phenomenal. I have a team of 50 people. We’re not a huge company, and yet we’re taking the supply chain seriously. And within that team, I have some smart individuals that I’m just grateful to work with every day.”
Making the most of digital and data
Vaughan reports to Richard Joseph and is a member of the executive board. She manages the end-to-end supply chain and the strategic sourcing of the firm’s products, which draws on the specialist procurement team under her wing.
“So, the beautiful designs that we come up with in London, we go and find somebody who can manufacture that product to our high standards,” she says. “It’s about ensuring we can do that task at the right price and time.” Other areas of responsibility include demand and supply planning, customer service and order management.
Digital and data play a crucial role in modern supply chain operations at Joseph Joseph. “Technology becomes more critical every month as things move on,” she says. “Ultimately, the world is too complex these days for us to have someone handing around pieces of paper. We need to be systemically controlled.”
“Technology becomes more critical every month as things move on. Ultimately, the world is too complex these days for us to have someone handing around pieces of paper. We need to be systemically controlled”
Sacha Vaughan, Joseph Joseph
The company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system runs on SAP. While this platform is critical for day-to-day operations, Vaughan says other areas of IT supporting the supply chain need work. However, dealing with that situation carefully is part of her long-term plan to transform the company’s operational activities.
“I’ve purposely kept us a little bit undeveloped this year because I want to work out how we want to run things here. I think some organisations jump into picking the new shiny technology and then try to bend their processes around what that technology can do, and you end up with suboptimal supply chains,” she says.
“What I want to do is be super clear on aims. Then we’ll go shopping for the right systems that meet those requirements, as opposed to buying a demand planning system that doesn’t deliver what the business needs. I want end-to-end integrations with systems that all work in the same direction and talk to each other seamlessly.”
Vaughan says that making those decisions will rely on working out how to integrate with customers and suppliers, allied to a careful consideration of how suppliers can help the business manage its inventory in the future: “We are looking at everything as an area of opportunity while we work out how we do things around here.”
Working with trusted partners
When it comes to the general direction of travel for supply chain technology at Joseph Joseph, Vaughan says application programming interfaces (APIs) are already the standard way of communicating with partner organisations. She’s interested in exploring the potential of emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), at the right time for the business.
“We have some elements of AI in our demand planning area, where we make predictions about what our customers are going to buy and when they’re going to buy it,” she says. “I think that’s a basic way of using AI, but there are more possibilities that we can leverage. However, they’re not firmly on our roadmap at the moment.”
Vaughan says any decision to use emerging technology is made in concert with the company’s IT director. Her team works closely with the technology department. While the IT department might like to move faster, Vaughan says it’s important to temper expectations as she sets her supply chain strategy in stone.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, Sacha, this is all the great technology out there that we could use.’ And I’m saying, ‘Yeah, that looks good. However, just let me get my house in order.’ I don’t want to put sticky plasters over things and have a problem recur in six months. [I want to] take a step back and fix our business challenges with technology forever,” she says.
I don’t want to put sticky plasters over things and have a problem recur in six months. [I want to] take a step back and fix our business challenges with technology forever Sacha Vaughan, Joseph Joseph
One of Vaughan’s most important moves was to establish a new partnership for third-party distribution centres in the UK. Her team ran a major procurement exercise after she joined in February. In July, Joseph Joseph’s end-to-end supply chain partnership with XPO Logistics became operational, and technology plays a key role in the approach.
“Everything’s got to be well controlled,” she says. “I was looking for a third-party partner who could ensure that we’re properly, systemically controlled. The data interface between us and XPO is seamless, with the right data in the right place at the right time, and interfaces that support our business, rather than a scrambled approach.”
Focusing on core activities
Joseph Joseph ships its stock to XPO’s third-party distribution centre in Rugby, where the logistics firm manages omnichannel fulfilment, warehousing, pre-retailing and distribution services for customers – both major retailers and individual consumers. Vaughan says the partnership allows her team to focus on growing the business rather than firefighting.
“You’ve got to know where your business is and what is core to you and where you want to focus,” she says. “I firmly believe that if you get the right partner, then logistics becomes a quiet part of the business. Because it’s the end of the chain, it can be super noisy. However, when fulfilment goes well, nobody talks about it, it’s super quiet, and you can get on with the stuff that’s going to control your costs and grow your business.”
Vaughan recognises that some companies choose to take control of fulfilment internally. In many cases, particularly for large firms, she says that’s a misguided approach. Successful digital transformation is a tricky process, and using the knowledge of an expert like XPO Logistics means her team can help Joseph Joseph deliver better customer experiences.
“Warehouse management systems are expensive – they take a lot of development, and a lot of technology is required to make things seamless,” she says. “It’s a lot of work running the distribution centres, and it’s a distraction from your core business. Giving this responsibility to people who are experts, and who can do it in a sustainable, repeatable, scalable way, is much more efficient, especially for a growing business.”
Vaughan reflects on the changes she’s seen during her time on the operational front line and is positive about the role of supply chain officers in the digital age. As more boards wake up to the opportunity to use high-quality fulfilment as a strategic lever for growth, she says the opportunities for her peers are significant, so long as they recognise the important role of digital transformation.
She says: “We need to think about key questions, such as, ‘How can you start with the customer and work back to make things frictionless?’ That’s where technology and supply chain should be focused. More and more, that’s the direction of travel, and supply chain leaders who are successful will be the ones who are really focused on the customer.”
United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation arrests and raids.
Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show the agency is seeking private vendors to run a multi-year surveillance program out of two of its little-known targeting centers. The program envisions stationing nearly 30 private analysts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Vermont and Southern California. Their job: Scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, converting posts and profiles into fresh leads for enforcement raids.
The initiative is still at the request-for-information stage, a step agencies use to gauge interest from contractors before an official bidding process. But draft planning documents show the scheme is ambitious: ICE wants a contractor capable of staffing the centers around the clock, constantly processing cases on tight deadlines, and supplying the agency with the latest and greatest subscription-based surveillance software.
The facilities at the heart of this plan are two of ICE’s three targeting centers, responsible for producing leads that feed directly into the agency’s enforcement operations.The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center sits in Williston, Vermont. It handles cases across much of the eastern US. The Pacific Enforcement Response Center, based in Santa Ana, California, oversees the western region and is designed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Internal planning documents show each site would be staffed with a mix of senior analysts, shift leads, and rank-and-file researchers. Vermont would see a team of a dozen contractors, including a program manager and 10 analysts. California would host a larger, nonstop watch floor with 16 staff. At all times, at least one senior analyst and three researchers would be on duty at the Santa Ana site.
Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests.
Researchers from EPFL, AMD, and the University of Novi Sad have uncovered a long-standing inefficiency in the algorithm that programs millions of reconfigurable chips used worldwide, a discovery that could reshape how future generations of these are designed and programmed.
Many industries, including telecoms, automotive, aerospace and particle physics rely on a special breed of chip called the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Unlike traditional chips, FPGAs can be reconfigured almost endlessly, making them invaluable in fast-moving fields where designing a custom chip would take years and cost a fortune. But this flexibility comes with a catch: FPGA efficiency depends heavily on the software used to program them.
Since the late 1990s, an algorithm known as PathFinder has been the backbone of FPGA routing. Its job: connecting thousands of tiny circuit components without creating overlaps.
For decades, it worked so well that it became the standard. However, as circuits grew larger, engineers began encountering frustrating slowdowns and occasional outright failures. Designs that should have worked were often labeled “unroutable.”
Now, with colleagues from the University of Novi Sad and the technology company AMD, researchers from the Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory (PARSA) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences have come one step closer to untangling the inner workings of this classic algorithm.
In their paper, which received the Best Paper Award at the 33rd IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, they revealed why these failures happen and how PathFinder’s limits can be overcome.
Cracks in the algorithm
“In fact, it’s not surprising that PathFinder sometimes fails,” explained Shashwat Shrivastava, Ph.D. student with PARSA and first author of the paper.
“Very early on, researchers showed that the problem behind FPGA routing is extremely hard. Later, the creators of the original algorithm, together with a few collaborators, found cases where PathFinder would never succeed—but they noted such cases wouldn’t appear in practice.”
For decades, it seemed they were correct—PathFinder worked surprisingly well.
“PathFinder worked so well, in fact, that when it failed, people rarely questioned the algorithm. Instead of venturing inside to see what was going on, they tweaked its parameters, modified circuits, or switched to larger FPGAs,” added Stefan Nikolić, an EPFL alumnus and now a professor at the University of Novi Sad.
“Part of the reason for this is that it is rather difficult to understand what PathFinder is actually doing on examples of practical importance. Modern circuits are so large that their signals form veritable on-chip jungles.”
Enter the forest
“So, we really needed to look at the individual trees in that jungle,” continued Shrivastava, “and I really mean trees. Each signal—a connection that carries information between circuit components—must reach multiple destinations without overlapping other signals. FPGA routing is essentially about building one tree for each signal on the chip.”
While working on another project that relied on PathFinder, the team kept seeing results that defied intuition. At first, they blamed external factors, not the algorithm itself. Eventually, they realized they needed controlled examples: small, tricky cases where a solution definitely existed, and in which PathFinder should succeed.
“We needed real, practical examples, and lots of them, to understand what was really going on,” Shrivastava explains. “So, we built a framework to automatically extract small, hard problems from real circuits. Watching how PathFinder struggled with these helped us uncover issues that had remained hidden for a very long time.”
Power in partnership
“This breakthrough would have been much harder without industry support,” said Mirjana Stojilović, Shrivastava’s Ph.D. advisor. “From the start, we collaborated with Chirag Ravishankar and Dinesh Gaitonde from AMD. They helped us model FPGAs as close as possible to commercial devices, ensuring our findings had real-world impact.”
Once the framework was ready, things moved quickly. The team found that PathFinder often built routing trees larger than necessary, increasing the risk of overlaps. The problem came from the order in which it created and added new branches to the trees.
“In retrospect, this is intuitive, but somehow it went largely unnoticed for many years,” Shrivastava said. “Our first solution was simple: try different orders and pick the one that results in the smallest tree. Experimentally, it worked surprisingly well.”
The team is now exploring more scalable solutions. “I am especially proud that Summer@EPFL interns have been contributing significantly. One of them, Sun Tanaka, is also a co-author of the paper,” added Stojilović.
“Our discovery could reshape how millions of FPGAs are programmed and influence the design of future generations of these reconfigurable chips.”
More information:
Shashwat Shrivastava et al, Guaranteed Yet Hard to Find: Uncovering FPGA Routing Convergence Paradox, 2025 IEEE 33rd Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) (2025). DOI: 10.1109/fccm62733.2025.00060
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Cracking a long-standing weakness in a classic algorithm for programming reconfigurable chips (2025, October 3)
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Despite increasing awareness, AI shopping assistants have yet to achieve widespread adoption in the US. While 43 per cent of Americans are aware of these tools, only 14 per cent have used them. Usage is highest among Gen Z (24 per cent) and parents of children under 18 (21 per cent), whereas just 7 per cent of baby boomers have tried them, according to a new YouGov study.
For current users, key benefits include getting answers to product questions (44 per cent), finding specific items (41 per cent), and locating the best deals (34 per cent). For non-users who are open to trying AI, the most appealing features are price comparisons (67 per cent), evaluating similar products (56 per cent), and accessing product information (55 per cent).
However, trust is a major barrier. Forty-one per cent of Americans say they do not trust AI shopping assistants at all, and only 13 per cent mostly or completely trust them—compared to 53 per cent who trust personal recommendations. Privacy concerns, a preference for human assistance, and fears of upselling further fuel scepticism.
AI shopping assistants remain underused in the US despite 43 per cent awareness, with only 14 per cent having tried them.
Gen Z and parents show the highest adoption.
Users seek answers, deals, and product info, but trust remains low due to privacy concerns and scepticism.
Interest is strongest in clothing, electronics, and groceries.
Wider adoption hinges on building trust and proving real value.
When it comes to shopping categories, consumers are most open to using AI for clothing and accessories (20 per cent), consumer electronics (21 per cent), groceries and household essentials (19 per cent), and travel planning (18 per cent). Interest is much lower for purchases involving finances, vehicles, or pet care.
Retailers such as Walmart and Amazon are already deploying AI tools like Sparky and Rufus to improve customer experience. Yet, the study highlights that broader adoption depends on demonstrating genuine value, safeguarding data, and rebuilding trust—especially among more cautious consumers.
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